For dinner tonight, I made my (soon to be) world famous Southwest Indian chili. Mmmmmm…
Now I realize that some people (Texans) would say that whatI make is NOT chili, because I put beans in it. Not just chili beans, but 3-4 different kinds of beans. Sometimes I put in lentils too.
While I do not have a recipe for it (I make it slightly different each time), I generally like to add many other ingredients that people often do not think about adding to chili. Aside from the variety of beans, I also like to add several different types of meat. Usually I start with ground beef, and I add strips of marinated steak. I also chop up some sausage, like Kielbasa or chorizo. If I have any chicken around, I’ll cut that up and add it in.
As for other goodies, i put in choped white and green onions, chopped garlic, potatoes, several types of peppers both hot and mild, lots of cilantro, parsley, leeks, and whatever else I can find.
I add my spices, and simmer it for as long as I can, the longer the better.
I serve it over white rice, and have tortillas on the side.
I wouldn’t consider that chili either since, to me, it has beans in it by definiton but it does sound interesting. Especially if some sour cream were stirred in afterwards.
Not to cast aspersions on your heritage or anything, but your Masala concoction with cilantro, lentils, chicken, leeks, potatoes and chorizo ain’t chili. It may be spicy and delcious but chili? Nah. For gods sake, does this concoction even have a single tomato in it?
Diced cubed beef steak, black beans, red beans, kidney beans, tomatoes, tomato puree, crushed red pepper seed, onions, cumin. That’s chili, dammit.
I know not of this “swill” of which you speak. My chili is second only to nectar of the gods and possibly my mother’s milk in UNADULTERATED DELECTABLE GOODNESS. Were I assassinated immediately after eating a bowl, the chili remaining undigested in my autopsied stomach would still be FAR superior fare to haute cuisine recipe you posted.
Seriously… cinnamon, chocolate, bell peppers and sugar in chili? (insert two foot :eek smilie icon) That’s some wicked powerful strain of ganga y’all are smokin…
Unsweetened chocolate actually pairs up nicely with hot pepper. For example, the Mexican Mole sauce features chocolate. We tend to use chocolate as a sweet dessert product, but it complements these sorts of sauces. You don’t use enough to make hot cocoa, just a touch to embellish the flavor.
I need to remember this the next time I put together a chili-like concoction.
Oh, I know chocolate and peppers go together and would like to try authentic cocoa like the Aztecs (or was it the Incas?) drunk it – cold, bitter, and spicy – but I don’t want chocolate in my chili. Cinnamon? Sure. But no chocolate.
Does anyone have an idea of who originally invented chili? I kind of agree with Onioneye that it can be whatever you want. Although I won’t eat any chili with green peppers out of respect for my stomach’s intolerance of green peppers. But I would like to know what the original recipe was, more or less, if that’s knowable.
And I know it’s Odinoneeye, but the way I wrote it above is how I usually read it, and it seems appropriate in this thread.
Your original Texas bowl of red, your chili for absolute purists, is made with meat (pemmican, in some cases); suet or some other kind of fat; chile peppers (possibly the wild berrylike kind known as “chilipiquins,” “chiltepins,” “tepins” or “pequins”); garlic – and that’s it. No tomatoes, no onions. It gets its red color from the chilis or maybe from some dried chile powder, such as paprika, not from tomatoes.
And using beans in any recipe more complicated than the above is, believe it or not, traditional. Ground beans were used as a thickening agent in the chili that was provided to Army troops in the late 19th Century.
The OP says her chili is made with several kinds of beans, “not just chili beans” – in fact there is no such thing as a “chili bean”; there are several varieties of beans which have become associated with chili but they all have their own names – pinto beans, kidney beans, small red beans, pink beans, etc.
See:
The Ultimate Chili Book by Christopher B. O’Hara (The Lyons Press, 2001).
The Ultimate Chili Cookbook by W.C. Jameson (Republic of Texas Press, 1999).
Chili Madness by Jane Butel (Workman Publishing, 1980).
Not true. There is a general consensus that chili must contain:
Meat. Some kind of meat. “Vegetarian chili” is an oxymoron, although it might make a delicious recipe. Chile was invented as a way to make very cheap, tough cuts of meat, even pemmican/jerky, palatable on the trail.
Chile peppers – in some form, whether fresh, dried, or powdered. There are dozens of varieties of chile peppers. Any but the sweet bell pepper will qualify your dish as chili.*
*The peppers are spelled “chile.” The dish is spelled “chili.” A prepared powder of dried and ground chile peppers with other spices is “chili powder.”
Chile was probably invented in San Antonio, Texas, possibly as early as the late 1600s, nobody knows by whom – although there is an unsubstantiated legend of a Spanish nun named Sister Mary of Agreda, “La Dama de Azul,” who would go into trances for several days and brought the first chili recipe back from one of them. More likely it was invented by the poor as a way of spicing up cheap cuts of meat. (Cheap and tough – traditionally, chile should be simmered a very long time, to tenderize the meat.) Chile might have been an adaptation of traditional Spanish stews, brought to San Antonio by colonists from the Spanish Canary Islands, and augmented with the New World’s chile peppers. At any rate, by 1880, San Antonio “chile queens” were serving up homemade chili to cattle drivers, soldiers and railroad men in the Military Plaza Mercado. (Sanitation laws put the “chile queens” out of business in 1943.) See The Ultimate Chile Book, by Christopher B. O’Hara (The Lyons Press, 2001).
